June 2012 Archives

'Color Jam' by Jessica Stockholder Opens in Chicago

Jessica Stockholder's
installation "Color Jam" is a summer-long transformation of State and
Adams Streets in downtown Chicago. The colors extend up parts of the
surrounding buildings.

By GWENDA BLAIR

Published: June 5, 2012

CHICAGO- In 2009 the multimedia artist Jessica Stockholder used brightly colored
plywood platforms and metal bleachers to turn a section of Madison
Square Park in New York into a kind of abstract painting, "Flooded
Chambers Maid." Children instantly appropriated it as a playground, and
adults used it as an informal seating area.

This week her latest work, "Color Jam," begins a summer-long occupation
of an intersection in the Loop in downtown Chicago. By wrapping the four
corners of State and Adams Streets (and parts of buildings there) in
swaths of burnt orange, lime green and turquoise -- think of Christo
meets Hans Hofmann -- she deconstructs this slice of the
business-as-usual world and transforms it into a playful and imaginative
realm.

Ms. Stockholder, whose work has been shown at Dia Art Foundation in New
York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Pompidou Center in
Paris, is the chairwoman of the visual arts department at the University
of Chicago and is known for multidimensional, site-specific works that
merge painting and sculpture